When interacting with brick-and-mortar merchants, customers often obtain items in a physical location and then pay for the items prior to leaving the merchant's location. For these merchants, an inventory of items is often updated sometime following completion of a transaction involving the item. For example, the merchant may run a batch process at the end of the day to update inventory counts for all items. However, inventory counts may be updated more frequently, such as immediately after the completion of a transaction.
When interacting with fulfillment-based merchants, customers may rely on the merchants to fulfill the items because some or all of the items cannot be immediately obtained by customers. Fulfillment merchants may include electronic marketplaces, merchants that deliver items and warehouse fulfillment merchants that “showroom” items. For fulfillment-based merchants, inventory may be adjusted, at least temporarily, prior to completion of a transaction. Since customers of fulfillment-based merchants do not have an item in-hand, management of inventory control could result in a user proceeding with a transaction of an item that is indicated as in-stock, but turns out to be out-of-stock by the time the transaction is complete, resulting in a poor customer experience. Therefore, fulfillment-based merchants often encumber inventory of an item after occurrence of a pre-designated event that occurs before or immediately after completion of a transaction, regardless of other factors, thereby preventing, at least temporarily, the item from being purchased by another customer.
Encumbering inventory too early in a process may result in lost or missed sales where an item is made unavailable to other customers who may desire to purchase the item. Encumbering inventory too late in a process may result in a poor customer experience, as indicated above, because a customer's expectation to receive an item may not be fulfilled or upheld by the merchant.